Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany: Repression and Rhetoric (review)

This superb book on state-sponsored censorship of the 1820s in the German lands (Heady’s term, 4) is based on a dissertation supervised by Michael Perraudin in the UK, but this is no mere dissertation: it is a mature, well-written and -documented set of valuable case studies representative of a current generation of political analysis of texts. It offers new insights into the long nineteenth century and its official state apparatuses, as it shows how states tried to control writing and performances they deemed inappropriate or threatening.

The introduction surveys current critical approaches to censorship in general, stressing how it is best considered as a field of discourses. Through this overview, Heady establishes her project as focused specifically on state censorship, setting it against the longer history of censorship in this region of Europe. She traces how the Enlightenment and its move toward bureaucracy allowed Austria and Prussia to develop full-blown censorship apparatuses at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1815, the German Confederation supported the regulation of written texts; it made this regulation compulsory in 1819, in legal rulings remaining in force until 1918 and the Weimar Republic’s ban on restrictions to freedom of publishing. Starting in the 1840s, state censorship acquired new urgency, especially in Austria (which paid particular attention to theater censorship, not just the texts, but the performances as well). After the introduction, Heady amplifies her historical exposition in a chapter on the 1819–48 era, focusing on the evolution of the individual institutions and agencies that exercised censorship in various German regions.

The body of the book is devoted to a set of case studies from the 1820s, on texts by Grabbe, Heine, and Grillparzer. Each chapter takes up a different set of issues—different ways that a text can be considered political—and then offers close readings of alterations to wording and emplotment in response to documented interventions by censors. Reference to contemporary ethics, politics, laws, and social norms clarifies what was at stake for the authors involved, demonstrating how close readings can uncover attitudes about and practices related to politics.

The first two cases are works by Grabbe: Herzog Theodor von Gothland (published 1827), and Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung (an 1822 comedy). After briefly introducing the plot and publication history of Herzog Theodor in Chapter One, Heady traces how the plot implicates issues of the day, especially current social and governmental norms associated with religion, sexuality, morality, and family. In each section, Heady takes concrete examples of how passages were altered between versions of the text, and suggests why these changes relate to those politicized contexts. Chapter Two does parallel work for passages in the comedy, although focused more on how wordings answer to specific laws, not just attitudes or conflicts—thus expanding how the political references in texts can be recovered in careful readings.

Chapters Three and Four present two texts by Heine to amplify issues of rhetoric in relation to censorship. The first deals with his Briefe aus Berlin, one set of the Reisebilder, written in 1828 for a newspaper in Westphalia (a region under Prussian control). Heady’s focus is on how Heine clearly targeted and addressed political situations through circumlocution, and how he deployed observations about Berlin for his Westphalian audiences to triangulate explicit political interventions without actually initiating them. This analysis is amplified in Chapter Four, on his Reise von München nach Genua (begun 1825, and published in 1828). These two chapters demonstrate how rhetorical gambits make up the heart of Zensursprache, arguing how Heine pushed the envelope of his own political expression as he made clear political statements through oblique references that would make sense to his readers and subtle but unmistakable shifts in narrative voice. These chapters should be compulsory reading for anyone engaged in Heine studies, because they recover how Heine challenged his contemporaries’ politics and attitudes.

Chapter Five addresses one of the nineteenth century’s most famous censorship episodes...